When she looked again, a man was moving among the sheep on the hill. The ewes came to him. He walked to and fro, standing now and again to look about him. He picked up a lamb by the hind legs and slapped it on the shoulder. The mother came running, and he put the lamb down again.
Slash had a brother called Packie who ran a butcher’s shop in the village. He bought wethers from Slash and hung their carcasses from hooks in the window. He looked every inch a butcher. While Slash was lanky and wiry, his brother was short and stocky with the set of a man who lived entirely on meat and soup. His interest in his work was passionate. Last week she asked him for three pounds of middle neck, and he spent twenty minutes trimming the meat, so great was his delight in his butchering.
‘It’s lovely to watch your own meat being cut. It’s like having a suit made to measure,’ he told her as he rubbed two greasy hands on his blood-speckled apron.
She ordered two chump chops, one for herself and one for Gulban. He took the hindquarters of a lamb off a hook and severed the legs with a single stroke of his cleaver. Then he cut a chop off the top end of each leg with his saw, and she recoiled from the thought that the fat man in the shop diminished the lanky man on the hill.
Just before noon Slash came back carrying a lamb with a broken leg. He put a splint to the leg and tied it neatly with a piece of string.
‘Will he be all right?’ she asked.
‘It usually works, given time.’ He spoke without turning to look at her.
‘It is a he, isn’t it?’
‘He could be a ram but my own feeling is that he will grow into a wether.’
‘I’d like to look after him till he’s well,’ she said.
‘No need. I’ll bring down his mother this evening. She’s a great lady, she’ll give him every care.’
‘I could keep an eye on him, it’s no trouble.’
‘It isn’t good to get too fond of a lamb. They grow up quickly. Now a bullock is different. He takes longer. There is time and plenty to get to know a bullock. If I ever have a sick one, I’ll let you nurse him.’
He looked up and laughed. His lean face was weathered and he had a chipped tooth in front which he’d got as a young man trying to lift a hundredweight bag of flour with his mouth for a bet.
She went back to the kitchen to prepare lunch and recalled a summer afternoon while she was still a schoolgirl. Cookie and she had been playing in the river and on the way home they came upon Slash trimming castrated lambs in a pen. Some months earlier he had put an elastic band up over the scrotum of each male lamb that wasn’t designated for tupping. The scrotums withered and turned black, as Cookie never ceased to tell her. Slash bent over a kicking lamb, the thick haft of the knife in his hand. A hard, black clod rolled on the ground. He pocketed the rubber band for future use, and she and Cookie pretended that they hadn’t been looking. He kicked the heap of black, round clods with his wellington boot and scattered them all over the sheep pen.
‘Roasted chestnuts, roasted chestnuts!’ he called after Cookie and Pauline. ‘Five for sixpence, twelve for a shilling. Get your roasted chestnuts here.’
If Cookie had been on his own, Slash wouldn’t have said anything. The roasted chestnuts had been entirely for her benefit. Fifteen years later his attitude towards her was still the same.
When she brought Gulban his lunch, she found him slumped on the bed, slavering at the mouth with one hand hanging over the edge. His face was grey, he looked barely warm. She fetched Cookie and Joey and called a doctor. She felt cold herself. She could not help wondering if this was the beginning of the final struggle.
The doctor said that he’d had another stroke and he recommended that they get a nurse to sit with him day and night until his condition became stable.
‘Stable?’ she heard Joey say to Cookie. ‘It could become stable either way.’
Father Bosco came before dinner and gave him extreme unction. They all stood round the bed. Gulban lay on his back with his eyes closed and a pair of rosary beads that were not his own wound round his fingers. His rigid lips were dry and his breath came from between them in slow, high rasps. All that remained unchanged was the wiry hair that stood out in tufts above his ears.
Father Bosco took her into the back office and pressed his thumb into the flesh of her forearm. She stood close to him, breathing the musty smell of his cassock, resisting her desire to move away.
‘This is more serious than the first,’ he said. ‘Only toughness and determination will pull him through this time.’
She waited impassively for him to release his grip.
‘It must have come suddenly,’ he continued. ‘He was chirpy enough when I saw him yesterday.’
‘You can never tell with strokes,’ she replied, not wishing to mention the surveyor’s report.
‘Anything could happen now. I must ring Canon Sproule and tell him that I’ll be staying the night.’
‘I’ll put you in the room next to him. I’ll air the sheets and get everything ready – ’
He released his grip and transferred his hand to her shoulder.
‘Thank you, Pauline. Without you, what would become of us?’
She escaped from the office, pleased to have something practical to do. As she climbed the stairs, she realised that she had never before thought about life without Gulban.
‘Where are we now?’ Joey asked.
‘Exactly where we were yesterday,’ Cookie replied.
Joey had invited him to his room for a review of strategy and in the hope that under the threat of Gulban’s death they might find common ground.
‘Where were we yesterday?’ Joey pursued.
‘What I mean is that nothing has changed. He was cross with us this morning but he hasn’t yet had time to disinherit us.’
‘If he recovers, we could be the worse for it.’
‘I want him to recover,’ said Cookie, picking up a book on the Jurassic system which lay on Joey’s bed.
‘Is that true?’
‘It is true.’
‘You can never know the truth about yourself. Your aim must be to define the false and in defining it edge an inch closer to the truth.’
‘I want him to recover,’ Cookie repeated.
‘So do I – up to a point. If I knew he would disinherit me on recovery tomorrow, I’m afraid I should vote for a quiet and easeful exit today. I’m being frank because I abhor humbug, my dear Cookie. Humbug is a means of ensuring that other people think well of us. Unfortunately, we must also contrive to think well of ourselves.’
‘I’m not as obsessed with inheriting as you are. Over the winter I’m afraid I lost some of my enthusiasm.’
‘Is that why you split on me?’
‘I didn’t split on you. I said that it was a prank and that we were both responsible.’
‘It was a careless thing to say.’
‘We see things differently,’ said Cookie.
‘As you say, you’ve lost your appetite for property. Is that why you haven’t made an offer for Fort Knox?’
‘Where would I get fifty thousand pounds?’
‘I’ve made an offer of ten thousand. Being in the running, even as an outsider, gives me a pleasure which I can only describe as erotic.’
Cookie’s incredulous laughter had the force of a gunshot.
‘If I had fifty thousand to spare, I’d gladly pay it. Fort Knox is a palace of dreams and a hall of mirrors, worth every penny. If it’s worth fifty grand to me, what must it be worth to you?’
‘It hadn’t occurred to me to put a price tag on it.’
‘So little has occurred to you lately, Cookie, that I wonder if such innocence can be genuine. Has it occurred to you that soon we may have to deal with Pauline. She’s headstrong and self-assertive. Will there be a place for her here after Gulban goes, I ask myself?’
‘She’s intelligent and industrious. She’s a capable manageress.’
‘She could be difficult to work with. Would she take orders from y
ou or me?’
Cookie got up and placed the book on Joey’s pillow.
‘Why do you read about rocks?’ he asked.
‘They’re more durable than plants. I like the Jurassic because I care to think that it contains the ancestors of Pauline’s ferns, beautifully fossilised for ever and ever and ever. Now, wouldn’t you like to be beautifully fossilised? Come on, admit it.’
‘I must dash.’
‘Sit down and let me pour you a drink.’
‘You know I’ve given up.’
‘A martyr for love’s sake!’
‘You must tell me more about the Jurassic at dinner.’ Cookie went to the door.
‘Take care how you go,’ Joey called after him. ‘Don’t fall into the fronds of one of Pauline’s ferns. Don’t be taken in by her lovely maidenhair, it conceals an adder’s-tongue. And don’t, whatever you do, lose your sense of humour. It’s precious and irreplaceable. It’s what distinguishes us from apes, baboons, stockbrokers, solicitors, politicians and other solemn primates.’
Joey went to the shelf and took down two of his rock samples, then sat on the edge of the bed with one in each hand. He had wanted to talk amiably to Cookie, but Cookie had the knack of awakening in him a kind of irritation which was akin to self-hatred. He stared at the sharp-edged rocks in his hands, not knowing what was to be done.
‘I’ll never make a scientist now,’ he said aloud. ‘I was born three hundred years too late. Locke said: “Take a frog and strip it. You may see the circulation of the blood if you hold him up against the sun.” To me that is real science. To make discoveries in those days you didn’t need a laboratory and a government grant. All that was necessary was to be observant.’
Ever since he could remember he had wanted to be a scientist, preferably an earth scientist with the breadth of intellect to take geology, geography, geophysics, geochemistry and geodetics in his stride. He was good at science at school. He was the best in his class at physics and chemistry, and he never got less than full marks in mathematics.
‘What makes a great scientist?’ one of the plodders asked the maths master in order to waste time one afternoon.
‘Having a creative mind, a mind that oozes ideas. A great scientist is as creative as a great artist.’
‘Do we have any creative minds here, sir?’ the time-waster asked.
‘No.’
‘What about me?’ Joey enquired. ‘I always get a hundred per cent in maths.’
‘Your strongest suit is certainly maths. You solve every problem I set you, but I suspect you’ll never discover for yourself a new mathematical problem. Creativity is only the formulation of problems.’
The class laughed delightedly. One of the dunces said, ‘Poor Joey, you’ll never win the Nobel.’
Joey laughed too. He laughed with such effort that he nearly choked. He loathed the sight of his own face but he had had faith in his intellect. Now the maths master had pronounced a sentence of death. He did no work in the study hall that evening, and he couldn’t sleep that night. At three he got up and made his way to the maids’ dormitory in the far wing of the building. He listened for young breathing and leapt in beside the sleeper in the first cubicle. Pulling up her nightdress, he pinned her down. He lay on top of her and prised her thighs open with his fist, making no effort to stifle her horrified screams. The lights came on and he was pulled by the legs off the struggling girl who turned out to be the matron, grey-haired and in curlers. The following morning he was expelled before breakfast. When he arrived home, he told Gulban that he couldn’t help it, that he had been overwhelmed by desire for a virgin in the middle of the night. To his surprise, Gulban kept his cool.
‘You have a lot to learn,’ he said. ‘Next time make sure it’s a virgin who is overwhelmed by desire for you.’
After that nothing much mattered. He was serving not one sentence but two. He had a face that no woman cared to look at and a mind that could solve only other men’s problems. Pauline owed him so much that she wouldn’t admit to owing him anything. Not that he considered himself a hero. He had never been aware of having made a heroic choice. If he’d deserted her and let her die, no one would have blamed him. He was only a boy at the time, yet he was old enough to have been capable of blaming himself. His act of courage changed the shape of his life. He had sacrificed sexual and emotional fulfilment so that Pauline could look cool, elegant and grandly superior.
At first she used to mother him because he was two years younger than she. On his first day at school she held his hand going in the gate, and when he had to go to the toilet in the middle of the morning, he asked her to take him. She waited outside and talked to him through the door while Cookie looked on and made fun of them both.
She spent the afternoons playing with Cookie in the river. He knew that they wished to escape from him, but now and again he caught up with them and joined in their games. Cookie favoured tig because he wanted to be touched by her. He himself favoured hide and seek because he wanted her to find him. He loved hiding from her with his heart beating, and it was such relief when she stole up behind and pounced on him. It was a moment for just the two of them that not even Cookie could share.
She was at her best then. No girl, not even Alicia, could have held a candle to her. At sixteen she was still beautiful, her face plump and soft, though her body had begun to thicken. It had lost the suppleness of a sappy sally rod. She had begun to fill her dress. Something had gone wrong, and it was spiritual rather than physical. Now at twenty-six the metamorphosis was complete. Her skin had gone dry and no decortication would cure it. Her throat had become stringy from too much slimming, and her hair had begun to lose its lustre. Strangers who came to the hotel thought her stunning because they had not seen her as a girl. Her gifts had come from a cynical and misogynistic god who conferred on her an elegance to inspire love while denying her the warmth that would satisfy it.
How she must have envied Alicia as she saw in her face the bloom and beauty which she herself had enjoyed so briefly. He had once seen her walking round Alicia, viewing the backward flowing lines of her hair-style, trying to invent a nuance of imperfection that wasn’t there. He should have said to Pauline that afternoon, ‘The curious thing about Alicia is that the back of her head is no less interesting than her face.’
He would have loved to see the ease with which she would conceal the pain of the affront.
The wrongness of his feelings tormented him, because the wrongness was invincible and inescapable. He went to bed with it and woke up with it, a too-tight skin that could never be shed. Yet there was a time when he and Cookie had shared her and when neither envied the other. Bosco and Jack were older; they couldn’t and didn’t join in the laughter he and Cookie found with her. Then she left both Cookie and himself standing. She took up with Jack and became like any ordinary girl. They pretended not to miss her, concealing the loss of magic from each other. Cookie’s scar was internal; his own was an ugly blaze on a vandalized tree. Jack did nothing, felt nothing, and took everything. His advantage was that he was older, and the games he played were more banal. Only Bosco escaped unscathed.
‘If he’d felt even a tenth of what I’ve felt, the chastity of the priesthood would have been an impossible price to pay.’ He returned the two pieces of oolite to the shelf.
Yesterday he’d seen a girl of sixteen in the butcher’s standing on one leg waiting meekly for her pound of mince. Her skin was clear as Alicia’s but her short, black hair was coarse. Alicia’s hair was long, sometimes curly and sometimes straight. It was light brown, almost fair in front, and when she combed it back, it formed streaks of different shades above her ears and a tight dark bun at the back, whelklike in its involutions. By comparison the hair over her forehead looked bleached, as if she’d spent her young life facing the sun. If the sky remained clear tonight, there would be a moon after eleven. He would go down to Fort Knox and scale the wall. He would sit for an hour on the summer seat behind the rhododendrons, which was more t
han Cookie would do for her now.
Chapter 24
Before going to bed she looked in on Gulban. The nurse was reading and he was asleep, breathing softly with his lips pressed tightly together. It seemed to her that he might expire at any moment without the slightest accompanying movement or sound. She went back to her room thinking that he would never see the morning.
The three sons, though not in absolute accord, were sleeping tonight under one roof. She had prepared Father Bosco’s room herself. He came up as she was putting a hot-water bottle in his bed and he stood by the window with his back to her.
‘I have a vivid memory of this room as a boy,’ he said. ‘I came in here one morning early and looked out over the moor at three or four sheep grazing. The dawn was creeping up the sky behind them. Their bodies were still dark but there was a glowing line of light all along their backs. It was extraordinary, a kind of revelation. I had a sense of timelessness. I felt very close to … the Bible.’
‘If you wake up early, you may see sheep in back-light again tomorrow.’
He turned to her with a little laugh that she found predictable and patronising. He always talked loudly and volubly whenever they were alone together, yet behind the words she could hear a terrifying silence. He seemed to be standing on a beach with a ground-sea breaking round him. He was shouting to make himself heard between waves, while she stood alone on another beach from which the sea had ebbed before she was born. In spite of that, she was never aware of unease in his presence, only when she rehearsed their conversation later with a disorientating sense of having been talking to a stranger.
Joey was also a stranger, and in a way which she found more abrasive and disturbing. He came up behind her in the porch one day and told her that the most interesting thing about her plants was their red and blue colouring matter.
‘The chemical structure of anthocyanins’, he said, ‘is a thing of endless fascination.’
Another day he’d asked her if a bat was a bird.
‘No,’ she said firmly.
The Red Men Page 21